Beautiful Renders Within Reach

THE BAR HAS BEEN RAISED

With the latest Lumion 8 release, the quality features we’ve come to expect have surpassed their predecessors. It’s now even easier to create realistic renderings at the push of a button and with minimal technical skill required. Lumion’s strive to be the “go-to” visualization program for design professionals is even more solidified, and for the advanced users of previous versions, there are plenty of new sub-features that allow you to create engaging projects that you never would have imagined. In this blog, we will give you an overview of our first impressions with Lumion 8, and a detailed account of how to access the new features. These include:

EASY CLICK STYLE BUTTONS

One of the newest features that we love in Lumion 8 are the new style buttons. Creating a beautiful model takes time; when you import it and add your materials, the last step is typically to define the styles or “effect stacks” for your photos or videos. In older versions, this step often took the most time to complete, with lots of dragging, dropping, and adjusting sliders to get just the right look. With Lumion 8, there’s a whole new way to dress up your model; simply select from the new style options and it will automatically apply the perfect style preset to your project.

SOFT AND FINE SHADOWS

Finally there is a true way to master realistic shadows. In Lumion 8, you can now turn on ‘Soft Shadows‘ and also the ‘Fine Details Shadows‘ in the Shadow effect. This will feather the hard edge of the shadows along your objects and surfaces in a way that imitates real-life shadow physics. Your renderings will shine with incredible realistic details.

OPEN STREET MAP

Creating context models is easy with the OpenStreetMap feature in Lumion 8. You now have the option to move your context map, adjust the height of the buildings, and pick style and colors. You also have the option to hide any buildings you chose from the imported context.

Check out the full feature list on Lumion’s home page, where you can also find additional tutorials. If you would like to sharpen up your 3D modeling skills and learn how to create models like the one we used in this demonstration, we have an online training course called, SketchUp for Professionals. We’re always working on something new, and we’ll have some great new materials, blogs, and resources available for you very soon. Subscribe below to get our updates, and we’ll catch you in the next tutorial!